Kotaku has an article analyzing comments from Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot on
addressing piracy. These mostly focus on piracy of DS games, but they also point
out one comment that indicates they may be working on some new internal DRM for
PC games: "Altogether on console, the piracy is low," says Guillemot. "On the PC
the piracy is quite a lot. We are working on a tool that would allow us to
decrease that on the PC starting next year and probably one game this year."

No citation needed for his argument: Beyond Good & Evil and Deus Ex just to name a few.

Really? Let's take a look at those games. Let's see... here's something from Wikipedia...

Beyond Good & Evil, initially designed by Michel Ancel, the creator of the Rayman series, as the first of a trilogy, was a commercial failure due to its ill-timed release and lack of popularity.

Nope. Nothing about piracy there. Translated, I think the gist of what they're saying is that it failed due to poor marketing. No surprise there; lots of good products fail commercially for that reason.

Now, how about Deus Ex...

[Deus Ex] received almost worldwide critical and industry acclaim, including being named "Best PC Game of All Time" in a 2007 poll carried out by UK gaming magazine PC Zone. It was a frequent candidate for and winner of Game of the Year awards, drawing praise for its pioneering designs in player choice and multiple narrative paths. It has sold more than 1 million copies, as of April 23, 2009.

So it was a niche game that still managed to sell over a million copies. Yep, sure sounds like it's a horrible failure that barely sold due to piracy.

One thing is for certain though, you do not develop and publish a title with the intent of accessing the piracy side of the market.

Apparently many current game publishers do. Did you miss the title of this story?

People pirating your game does not mean those people would magically be consumers if it was $20 cheaper.

Of course not. It's entirely possible that the game is more overpriced than $20. I've seen plenty of games on the shelf that I wouldn't have purchased at any price, let alone $50. But then, I also wouldn't waste my bandwidth pirating them either. The same is true of most people who pirate. I'd guess a good 90%+. The key point here is that (for most who pirate) if someone considers a game worth pirating, there's also some price point above manufacturing & distribution cost that they'd be willing to pay to get the game legally.

Do you have a link to a study showing that cheaper games entice pirates to purchase them?

Do you have a link to a study showing that they don't? There's plenty of evidence demonstrating that all the DRM in the world doesn't get any significant number of pirates to purchase the software they would otherwise pirate. (Indeed, there's more evidence showing that DRM instead influences people who would otherwise purchase the software to pirate instead so they don't have to deal with the DRM.) There's also plenty of evidence to demonstrate that as the price of a product drops, more people buy it.

Do you have any form of empirical data to suggest that game quality and piracy are linked?

None of this is based on empirical data on either side of the discussion, because it can't be.

Endo claims pirates can be made into consumers by simply "making great games with cheap prices" to quote him. That's what people are disputing here.

Pirates are already consumers. They're just not buying what some of the software publishers want them to. And the next time you want to quote someone, I suggest you actually do so.

Now, as to what I'm actually claiming...

Reducing prices can produce a significant net gain in influencing people to purchase instead of pirate, while DRM cannot.